Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the dialogue between Islam, Nathism and Vaishnavism in eastern Bengal in the 17th c. It provides a study of Sufi treatises on yoga from Chittagong and relocates the doctrinal standpoints of their authors in the contemporary debates on morals and around the figure of Krishna.

Paper long abstract:

The dialogue between Islam, Nathism and Vaishnavism in eastern Bengal around the seventeenth century is characterized by both identification and rejection. Thanks to several recent works on Bengali Sufism, the literature composed in the religiously diverse society of eastern Bengal can be apprehended in a different, more comprehensive way. Formerly Sufi texts on yoga were presented as oddities resulting from a rough attempt by the local populations to manage the rapid changes in the socio-religious landscape of the early modern period. By highlighting the nature of the seemingly composite religious idiom of the Chittagongian authors, Tony Stewart invited the readers of those texts to appreciate their internal dynamics, the "coherence of conception" that they project. Rather than the inadequate combination of several systems, it is the isotopy observable in this corpus that should be the focus of our attention.

By analyzing the Nurnama of Muhammad Shafi' and comparing its language with that of his relative Saiyad Sultan and his spiritual guide Haji Muhammad, in the first part of the paper I propose to describe this literary idiom and define the key doctrinal standpoints of the authors. After drawing the outline of the discourse of this didactic corpus, I will turn to narrative literature and examine the criticisms made by Muslim authors of this period toward some aspects of the Vaishnava faith. We should see that in this controversial atmosphere the interest for Muslim authors in yoga was instrumental in a larger discussion on morals and social behaviors.